Patrick Modiano & annie Ernaux
Read in the last days, two of my most favored French writers. Two novels with significant differences and some intrinsic similarities. Both modest in length and profound in content.
Firstly, Patrick Modiano’s newest work Chevreuse (Gallimard, 2021), read by me as Unterwegs nach Chevreuse (Hanser, 2022) and with an English translation due to be published as Scene of the Crime by Yale University Press next year.
I remember repeating – to only then deny – the oft heard criticism that one Modiano is some how not much different to the one that came before, and it would not surprise if the same arguments are not still to be heard in respect of Chevreuse. I even admit to brief moments of déjà vu, during which I did wonder whether I hadn’t strayed into familiar territory, situation. But why should I not, for that uncertainty is essential to memory. So one reads on, and is again seduced by that particular atmospheric that Modiano effortlessly conjures; imbued with images of the past; of person and place; haunting and defining each future until they too bow to the dictates of time.
Out of the city, westward beyond the 16th arrondissement with its bourgeoisie enclave of Auteuil on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and into the idyllic country side of the Chevreuse via the Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas. These are the main places of the journey that our writing protagonist Jean Bosmans takes us on as he excavates his childhood, his more youthful years and some intermittent; in search of the past and in the interest of his literary form – and that of Modiano; the third person, if you will, in command of the narrative. (A choice of perspective that perhaps allows for some distance – whether reliable is another matter.)
Typically (for Modiano), this narrative exists in multiple time frames – the elderly writer Bosmans in approximately the here and now, his younger self during the mid-1960s, and the child of fifteen years previously. Whereby it is those middle years that drive the particulars of the story; those youthful years of first experiences and great expectations. And, it is no wonder, for they are his formative years as a writer, and he is beginning to understand that one of the greatest tools for his craft lay in the fusion of memory – that is, lived experience and emotion as it roots itself in the subconscious and takes on its on life over time – and the creative processes of imagination.
Chance meetings that aren’t (for instance, with the lovely Camille, incongruously called “tête de mort”, about which I note an English translation predicament: “dead head” is very literal but perhaps too much “Grateful Dead” for my tastes!), a sinister cast of characters with changing names, too many coincidences, too many echoes from blurred childhood memories, all stimulate the young writer’s imagination, and all the time Modiano, with his wonderful gift for blending the stations of his own life with those of his fictive, half-fictive characters, is creating a new reality – for the page, the reader and maybe even himself.
Places are important; for these are the haunts of Modiano’s own childhood. Born in Boulogne-Billancourt (as Bosmans is), his familiy lived for a time in the Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas. It had to be that Proust was born in Auteuil. What for “Marcel”/Proust a mainline is, is for Bosmans/Modiano the shooting flame of a cigarette lighter – igniting his quest. Other objects are important, are symbolic – the watch, the compass – tellers of time and direction. Or more precisely, time lost and ways lost; to be found only in their translation to a literary form.
With Chevreuse we have another elegant addition to Patrick Modiano’s writing, re-writing, re-imagining of his own life. I know that this Jean Bosmans is an alter ego of sorts (as are others in other books), and I also know that there are strands, whether relating to person, place or time, that are drawn from a different perspective in some of his other novels; suggesting that it would be not remiss to seek out and delve further into his earlier work.
And a word on translation. Only those at home in both languages are in a position to make an informed determination, but for what it’s worth … Elisabeth Edl has with few exceptions over the last two decades translated Modiano’s work into German, and my reading and evidence suggests she has found and internalized a tonality that one could well imagine is consonant with the original. It reads beautifully.
L’événement (Gallimard, 2000) was promptly published in English translation (Happening, Seven Stories Press 2001, paperback 2019) but only last year in German translation (Das Ereignis, Suhrkamp, 2021), and to a resounding press echo here. Whether that was because of the reemergence of the abortion debate in the United States, I can’t say. What I can say is, abortion and peripheral debates to do with the acceptance, or at least, the normalization of the procedure, and the ensuing interplay with the health system, the Church, politics and the greater society have never really gone away in Germany either.
Written in just a few months in 1999, dependent upon the memories that have long plagued, even scarred, her, and referencing diary entries from 1963, Annie Ernaux’s extraordinary 100 page memoir of the circumstances and events surrounding her three month pregnancy, abortion and its aftermath, is so explicit, so brutally honest that one can do nothing but read it in haste – with awe, yes, but wishing it would find its end. Perhaps just as the young Annie wanted her pregnancy to just end.
Other than Modiano’s third person narration, Annie Ernaux writes in the first person (and it is Ernaux speaking to us); seeking distance through a cool, dispassionate form. Some could contend, for such an emotionally charged subject, too distanced is the tenor, but I would counter: if that was so, the reader would surely not fine oneself so invested in, so devastated by, the events and their outcome. But, it seems to me, with this radical choice of narration, Ernaux has found the right – perhaps the only – voice in which to relate her experience with immediacy and exactitude. I can only presume this was her intent: to write succinctly of an experience about which few have written before – certainly not (I don’t think) a literary star of this magnitude. To be truthful to herself and to her reader (and generations of women), Ernaux could do no other than put this ‘happening’, this painful but defining part of her life, to page.
L’événement is framed within and shaded by aspects familiar to readers of Ernaux’s work – the shame that accompanied her through much of her younger years, shame for her family’s working class, provincial milieu; exposing the prejudices and insincerity of the class in which she strives for acceptance, and the constant, nagging feeling of inadequacy. And her awareness of the casual and not so casual put downs based on class. For instance, an emergency room doctor castigates her based on his presumptions of her (lowly) social status and later when he is informed that she is a student of philosophy (not something for a working class young woman!) then presumes her to be “one of us”. It follows, he would not have been so brutal in word and manner had he known her standing. (Presumptions have a way of being right even when they are wrong, and rarely fair.) More generally, Ernaux inspires with her unremitting, no holds barred, method of excavating the crevices of her own person and history to expose the hypocrisies and bitter reality of an intransigent society.
In the nearly six decades since Annie Ernaux’s experience, abortion laws have been progressively liberalized in many western countries. Today a woman in France can have an abortion legally up until 14 weeks (decided earlier this year), conditional on two consultations but without consent or waiting clauses. A young woman should no longer have to go through what Annie did all those years ago. Unfortunately, one knows from the US debate – with laws running the gamut from illegality to the very liberal – and prohibitive statutes in places like Malta and Northern Ireland (what “legal but generally not available” means I wouldn’t know), that even in modern democracies pregnancy still remains a contentious matter of life and death for all concerned.
Modiano is a decade younger than Ernaux and comes from the class to which Ernaux once aspired, but they both came of age and were socialized within the restrictive (and conservative) structures of post-war France and the reaction against that society in the often turbulent years that followed. As writers, both have sought to look inwards and outwards and explain how it was; Modiano with fine atmospheric and Ernaux with stark realism, but all the time writing their way free and generously sharing that ‘never quite break with the past’ with their readers.
7th October 2022: And now both Nobel Laureates!